Between the reader and the teller of each of these Ukrainian folktales, only two people intervene: the person who recorded the story from a narrator and the translator. Since most of the stories were written down verbatim and translated into English as faithfully as possible, reader and narrator are thus brought into unusually close contact.

Eight of these stories are from the monumental collection made by Ivan Rudchenko, a Ukrainian ethnographer, and published in two volumes in 1869 and 1870 in Kiev, Ukraine. The remaining four are from the collection of Maria Lukiyanenko, a Ukrainian historian and teacher, published in 1947 in Germany. Each gathered the tales from primary sources—"from the lips of the people." Until now, few of the stories in these collections have been translated from the original Ukrainian.

Like many folktales, these animal stories were created by adults purely for their own entertainment and not, as with fables, for the purpose of demonstrating some moral truth or nugget of human wisdom. Children, too, have listened to these tales of the whimsical world of talking animals and, being connoisseurs, have found them quite to their taste.